Posts Tagged «us air force»

Air Force One — the US President’s flying fortress — which has been using the same clunky handsets since the Reagan administration in the ’80s, has finally received some slick new phones that are much more in keeping with Obama’s 21st century aesthetic. These new phones — customized versions of the the Airborne Executive Phone (AEP) — are provided by military contractor L-3 Communications, and they probably cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each. In what must surely be some of the best news the President has received in the last couple of years, while the old system consisted of two different phones — one for secure communications, the other for non-secure — each AEP is capable of making calls in either mode from a single handset.

The B-52 Stratofortress, which first entered service as a nuclear deterrent during the Cold War in 1952, has received its first ever technology overhaul. This overhaul, dubbed CONECT, brings the B-52H bomber kicking and screaming into the late 20th century, with a digital intercom system, color displays, a LAN for the plane’s various systems, and other bleeding-edge upgrades. Previously, the B-52H was a mishmash of digital and analog systems, with monochrome displays and targeting systems that had to be manually programmed from pen-and-paper coordinates. You’ll be glad to hear that, like the plane’s original load-out, all of the new systems have been radiation shielded for nuclear apocalypse warfare.

For just over 500 days, the US Air Force’s mysterious X-37B OTV-3 robotic space plane has been casually orbiting the Earth. What’s truly weird, though, is that its payload, current mission, and combat capabilities are completely unknown. X-37B OTV-3, one of the world’s largest artificial satellites, has been up there for 500 days, shows no sign of coming down any time soon, and we have no idea what it’s doing or what it can do.

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